Portrait Gourds Grown in Molds

Step 8 The Finished Gourd Sculpture

Here's Jim again with the finished sculptures.
One is tea-colored and one is the natural color of the gourd.
He's standing in front of a gourd vine [www.caningshop.com at his shop].

For more details on Zhang Cairi's methods, get a copy of the book.

This method will work for many other vegetables also. Portrait pickles anyone?

Comments

[Drake79]

Can you grow more than one gourd inside a mould? If so it would/could make for some really interesting effect....

[90mp11]

So long as you leave enough space so that the vine's aren't having any weight put on them I can't see a problem with it.

Wouldn't water get into the mould and rot the gourd in the process of the casting?

[vacu]

Nice one! They look beautiful and strange.

How about making a portrait mold in which the gourd stem comes out of the top of the head? Gourd bottom = face, gourd top = hat, remove hat to fill head.

[TechNerd1012]

haha yeah, you could make it look like a garden gnome lol

[Thinkenstein]

A very cool instructable. 

This is similar to an idea a friend once had to mold eggplants or other vegies to make Jesus faces and then to reverse shoplift them -- sneaking them into supermarket bins for people to find.   A miracle!

I think the Japanese used to mold square bamboo for furniture making.  Also, someone was molding cubical watermellons for more compact shipping and storage in refrigerators. 

[Hieronymus Reiter]

This is a brilliant technique! Pumpkins could be used in larger molds for Halloween decorations. You could also make gourds look like other kinds of food, like cucumbers that look like ears of corn or hot dogs, for instance.